In 2005, Adult Swim broke up its usual schedule of absurd cartoons with the thoughtful and
provocative animated adaptation of The Boondocks. If you want to know more about Aaron McGruder's
animated masterpiece, here's the behind-the-scenes story of The Boondocks - the comic strip,
the cartoon series, and its legacy.
Before The Boondocks was a hit animated series, it was a nationally syndicated comic strip.
And before that, it was an early webcomic, debuting as a regular feature in February
1996 on the since defunct website The Hitlist Online. Creator Aaron McGruder then pitched
it to The Diamondback, the student newspaper of the University of Maryland, where the cartoonist
was an undergraduate getting his degree in African-American studies.
After a couple of months, The Source had picked up The Boondocks as a strip. The comic would
ultimately run in the college newspaper for just about three months, and it ended when
a printing error left an installment out of an issue. McGruder was frustrated that he
was never given a proper explanation or apology from his editors and subsequently pulled the
strip entirely from publication.
In 1997 after Aaron McGruder pulled The Boondocks from his college newspaper, he submitted his
strip to companies that provided comics, puzzles, and advice columns to hundreds of newspapers.
The rejections piled on, with syndicates saying The Boondocks was too edgy for the comics
section of the average newspaper. But Universal Press Syndicate showed some interest in The
Boondocks, and the strip debuted as a national newspaper feature in April 1999.
But The Boondocks ultimately didn't run for long. In a world where Peanuts ran for 50
years and Garfield for more than 40 years, McGruder gave his strip seven years. McGruder
announced in 2006 that he was taking a hiatus from The Boondocks to focus on the Adult Swim
animated adaptation. By the end of the year, the break was made permanent. He said during
a speech at the University of South Florida:
"I got sick of the strip and sick of politics."
At its peak in the mid-2000s, The Boondocks was one of the most widely distributed strips
of all time. After one of the biggest debuts in syndication history - nearly 200 outlets
carried the strip in its first year - the strip ran in 350 newspapers in the U.S. alone.
The Boondocks was one of the most read comics ever and was also easily among the most censored.
Some newspapers, like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, chose to run it not on the funny pages but
deep in the editorial section.
In the post-9/11 era of American patriotism, Huey Freeman spoke out on the dangers of such
extreme sentiment, pointing out how so many were distracted that they didn't notice an
erosion of civil liberties in the name of national security. Major papers like Newsday,
New York Daily News and The Dallas Morning News placed the strip on its editorial page,
while other publications didn't run those specific strips at all. They had a similar
reaction when the strip took opposition to the war in Iraq and when it used a variation
of the "N-word."
The vast majority of newspaper comic strips are the work of one creator-cartoonist who
does it all, but The Boondocks employed several artists over the years. Running off and on
over the course of two decades, creator Aaron McGruder was always the writer, and he drew
Huey, Riley, and Granddad himself from the mid-'90s up until 2003, passing along primary
art duties to illustrator Jennifer Seng so as to refocus his efforts. McGruder told The
New Yorker:
"If something had to give, it was going to be the art. I think I'm a better writer than
artist."
Seng stepped out after a year and Carl Jones took over the artwork for The Boondocks, and
would also serve as co-executive producer on the Adult Swim show. He voiced a number
of characters on the show, including recurring character, Thugnificent.
The Boondocks began as a comic strip but Aaron McGruder had intended his idea for TV and
not the funny pages. He told the Chicago Maroon:
"I figured that no one would give me a show without a strip."
Even with a well-known comic, McGruder struggled to get a show made. According to an interview
with The A.V. Club, McGruder unsuccessfully attempted to sell the show for, quote, "over
five or six years" before selling the idea to Sony Pictures Television. He told the Tacoma
News-Tribune:
"The deals basically just didn't happen for a number of reasons, but most of them revolved
around, you know, creative control issues and things like that."
Fox contracted McGruder to make a pilot episode, but then they declined to order a full series
and Adult Swim jumped in and bought the show, debuting it in 2005.
Part of what makes The Boondocks show so special is its cast. The main characters are two vastly
different young siblings Huey and Riley Freeman. Huey is politically-informed, well-read, and
hyper-intelligent,
"Everyone I have a brief announcement to make: Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the devil,
and the government is lying about 9/11."
while his little brother Riley is obsessed with rap music and hip-hop culture. And yet,
the two feel like they're related, in part, because their voices are played by the same
actor.
Academy Award winner and Watchmen star Regina King voices both Freeman boys. And that's
a happy accident. Initially producers sought out different performers to play each part.
King stated:
"I originally was only playing Riley."
But then King read Huey's lines, and the showrunners couldn't find anybody who could top her take
on the character, so they hired her for both roles.
When The Boondocks was in the works as a show at Fox, filmmaker Reginald Hudlin, best known
for directing House Party and Boomerang, helped Aaron McGruder develop the project. He continued
as an executive producer through the first two seasons of The Boondocks during its Adult
Swim years, though it was something Hudlin only did as obligation. McGruder told The
A.V. Club in 2005:
"We don't have a partnership anymore. He is now running BET, and I have not spoken with
him in over a year."
In the second season, the show took aim at a channel called Black Entertainment Television,
calling it out as a harmful force to the African-American community. One episode shows BET executives
actively conspiring toward, quote, "the destruction of Black people." And at one point in the
show, Huey boycotts BET and stages a hunger strike.
"What's with all this hunger strike, boy, what did food ever do to you?"
"Can I be excused please?"
In another episode, the viciously anti-Black character Uncle Ruckus gets a reality show
on BET.
According to the Los Angeles Times, when executives at BET heard about the episodes, they called
Turner Broadcasting and insisted they not be broadcast, threatening a lawsuit. Neither
"The Hunger Strike" nor "The Uncle Ruckus Reality Show" originally aired on Adult Swim
in the US, and American audiences first saw them on The Boondocks DVD set.
As creator of The Boondocks, Aaron McGruder was one of the most influential Black voices
of 21st-century pop culture, a group that included writer, actor, and TV series creator
Tyler Perry. Perry is most well known for his role in the Madea movie franchise, as
well as his hit TBS sitcom House of Payne.
In the 2010 Boondocks episode "Pause," Granddad auditions to be in a play written by character
Winston Jerome, in which Jerome also dons drag to play the elderly Ma Duke. Along the
way, Jerome propositions Granddad, and viewers learn that the guy's whole deal is that he
uses religion and drag to hide the fact that he's gay.
The real Perry took offense and objected to his and McGruder's mutual bosses at Turner
Broadcasting, which owns both TBS and Adult Swim. According to The Los Angeles Times,
Perry was so upset that he told Turner executives that he'd take his business to another network.
When McGruder turned in the script, the company forced him to change the name of the Tyler
Perry-like character and then had him bury it deep in the season, instead of its original
placement as the highly publicized season premiere.
Like The Simpsons and Springfield, The Boondocks creates plenty of satire using its location,
a fictional suburb called Woodcrest. And also like Springfield, it's not entirely clear
exactly which American state Woodcrest is located within. It's a significant source
of fan speculation, and each of the major theories have their own merits.
Some think Woodcrest is a suburb of Baltimore, because that's where the comic strip was set.
In a March 2000 installment, Huey reveals his area code is 443, a Maryland prefix. The
show's entire premise mirrors McGruder's childhood experience of moving from Chicago to Columbia,
Maryland. And in the episode "Pretty Boy Flizzy," there's a mention of the concert venue Woodcrest
Post Pavilion, a play on Columbia's real-life Merriweather Post Pavilion.
It would be tough for the Freemans to live in Chicago because they fly back to the Windy
City, their former home, to attend a funeral in the episode "Wingmen."
"I'm going back home to Chicago."
"For good?"
"No."
But some viewers believe the show is really set in Chicago. In an episode about the criminal
trial of notable Chicago resident R. Kelly, Riley asks Granddad if he'll take him, quote,
"into the city" to watch it. Granddad tells him to walk, and Riley protests, saying:
"It's 40 miles!"
While main character Huey Freeman says a lot of things on The Boondocks that could be considered
controversial, the most polarizing figure in Aaron McGruder's fictional universe is
Uncle Ruckus, a rude, crude, elderly man who's viciously racist against Black people, despite
being Black himself, a reality he repeatedly denies. McGruder and the show's writers use
the character as one of their most powerful satirical tools, to expose and explore the
notions of systemic and self-internalized racism.
But an appreciation for Uncle Ruckus isn't universal among the show's large fanbase because
plans for a spinoff movie featuring the character failed. In January 2013, McGruder started
a Kickstarter in hopes of raising $200,000 in seed money for a live-action Uncle Ruckus
movie starring Gary Anthony Williams. More than 2,600 people donated to the project but
it fell short of its financial goal with about $130,000 raised. The movie was never made
and neither was a more general Boondocks big-screen movie, which show star Regina King discussed
on Sway in the Morning in 2012.
Creator Aaron McGruder always kept a watchful eye over The Boondocks, both the original
comic strip and the TV show that he created, executive produced, composed music for, and
occasionally acted in. He also took his time. New episodes of the show could take ages to
arrive, with 18 months passing between the end of season one and the beginning of season
two, and four years between seasons three and four.
McGruder's attention to detail and his slow and steady pace frustrated his bosses at Adult
Swim. According to The Los Angeles Times, a mutually agreeable production schedule couldn't
be reached, and in March 2014, just before the fourth season premiere, Adult Swim announced
that McGruder had left the show, and that the upcoming batch of episodes had been made
without his input. His name had even been removed from the show, right down to the disappearance
of his creator credit. McGruder announced his departure on Facebook. He stated:
"Huey, Riley, and Granddad were not just property to me. They are my fictional blood relatives.
Nothing is more painful than to leave them behind."
The Boondocks in both of its forms - multi-paneled comic strip or animated series - has acquired
a large audience over the years since Aaron McGruder stopped producing the strip in 2006
and the last original episodes of the Adult Swim show aired in 2014.
But in 2020, a period marked by a significant, fractured, and tumultuous political climate
in need of satire and commentary, McGruder brought back The Boondocks without warning.
In February 2020, a half-dozen strips appeared on the Instagram account of nationally known
radio host Charlamagne tha God. McGruder took aim at Donald Trump, likening the scandal-plagued
president to The Boondocks' Uncle Ruckus, as well as firing shots at R. Kelly and MSNBC.
And there's more good news for fans of the show. Later in 2020, there will be a reboot
of the series. Upstart streamer HBO Max ordered two seasons worth of new episodes of The Boondocks,
adding 24 to the Adult Swim package of 55, which the service also acquired and put into
circulation.
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